Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript: Beginner's Guide

By : Rachel Cordone
Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript: Beginner's Guide

By: Rachel Cordone

Overview of this book

Unreal Development Kit is the free edition of Unreal Engine—the largest game engine in existence with hundreds of shipped commercial titles. The Unreal Engine is a very powerful tool for game development but with something so complex it's hard to know where to start.This book will teach you how to use the UnrealScript language to create your own games with the Unreal Development Kit by using an example game that you can create and play for yourself. It breaks down the UnrealScript language into easy to follow chapters that will quickly bring you up to speed with UnrealScript game programming.Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript takes you through the UnrealScript language for the Unreal Development Kit. It starts by walking through a project setup and setting up programs to write and browse code. It then takes you through using variables, functions, and custom classes to alter the game's behavior and create our own functionality. The use and creation of Kismet is also covered. Later, using replication to create and test multiplayer games is discussed. The book closes with code optimization and error handling as well as a few of the less common but useful features of UnrealScript.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Actors versus objects


This will be a short topic, but an important one. Object.uc is the highest class in the class tree; all other scripts are subclasses of it. The most important subclass of Object is Actor. When working with UnrealScript, almost all of your work will be under Actor in the class tree. Actor contains code that gives classes a position in the world, lets them easily interact with each other and affect the game in some way. All of the other subclasses of Object can be thought of as more "informational" classes. For instance, if we take a look at InterpTrack and its subclasses, we can see that these classes define the tracks we can use in a Matinee such as movement or animation. The classes themselves have no useful purpose in the game world itself as, say, a projectile would.

Only Actor classes can be spawned, and indeed if we search through Actor.uc we can find the place where that function is declared:

native noexport final function coerce actor Spawn
(
   class<actor...